Moving down the list, we continue our series dissecting The Athletic’s fan poll, determining fan confidence in the NHL front office, where the Los Angeles Kings ranked 31st.
We’ve already looked at lineup construction and visions, now we’re moving into drafting and development.
See the original article to see the embedded media.
Related:
Lack of Confidence from Kings Fans in Reception: Roster Construction
Kings fans vindicated in their lack of confidence in the front office’s vision
I want to make it clear that I don’t like combining drafting and development into one category. They are two different things, handled by different departments within the organization and their success should not be determined together.
However, this is how The Athletic does it. I understand why, it’s easy, but it’s not ideal.
Since taking over in 2017, the Rob Blake-led Kings have drafted 52 players, 18 of which came in the first two rounds of the draft.
We will use these 52 players to judge Blake’s draft and development. You could argue that the players drafted a few years earlier should have been developed by Blake, but that gets very complicated.
Using the 2017 cutoff, let’s take a look at next season’s lineup. Akil Thomas Alex Laferriere, Alex Turcotte, Brandt Clarke, Jordan Spence and Quinton Byfield are expected to be NHL regulars next season, with Arthur Kaliyev and Samuel Fagemo having a chance to make the team.
Of that group, Anderson, Byfield, one of Clarke and Spence, and Laferriere are expected to play a significant role on this team.
It’s fair to exclude the last two drafts when looking for help for next season, so out of 43 picks (2017-22), the Kings signed six full-time NHL players and four playing a significant role on their team.
If we want to be generous, we can increase it to eight and 10 if we include Gabe Vilardi and Brock Faber as important players for other teams.
It’s not a terrible return, but it’s also not great when you consider how many of these players were drafted in the first two rounds.
Among this group of 14 players, there is a realistic world where Byfield is the only player in the top six or four. That’s a bad return. Again, you can defend three players if we include Vilardi and Faber.
This is where I think we need to separate crafting and development. Is these players’ lack of impact the fault of the scouting department or the development team?
Let’s complicate things even more here, I don’t think it’s either of our faults.
Where the Kings have really stumbled in their use of young players is in graduating them into NHL impact players, which falls on the NHL coaching staff and management.
The Kings recruited and, to some extent, developed players well, but at the final hurdle they fell flat on their face.
If you really want to get into the field, you could argue that the Kings simply didn’t draft enough good players or didn’t develop them into good enough players to warrant significant roster spots.
But I will always come back for this article at The Athletic examining why the Dallas Stars have been so successful in drafting and developing.
In short, they showed a lot of confidence in young players and gave their high draft picks chances to thrive in more natural roles.
Not the Kings. Their shift towards competing in the short term in 2021 began the process of blocking potential customers and not giving them the right opportunities to thrive and that is where they failed.
This is another example of why I don’t like to label it as “draft and development”, the Kings drafted and developed very well. This is yet another failure in the previous two areas, vision and lineup construction.
The mistakes made in these two areas created the problem of minimal high-impact players in Blake’s drafts.
If the Kings begin to better utilize young players at the NHL level and abandon Todd McLellan’s “money to extract from the ATM” method that gives veteran players much more room for error than young players, their success in the draft will start moving in the right direction.
It’s fair to place the blame on Blake here and give him a D- in this poll, but it’s important to separate this issue from the Kings’ scouting and development departments.
If there is one area this organization does well, it is drafting and development, even if that is hampered by management and coaching decisions at the NHL level.
